Atlantic puffins and other seabirds face severe welfare challenges from climate change affecting their food supply and nesting success.
Puffin chicks starving because parents cannot find adequate sand eels experience a prolonged, distressing death from malnutrition. Adults that exhaust themselves searching for increasingly scarce prey face physiological stress from energy deficit. Climate change is creating a phenological mismatch between the timing of puffin reproduction, calibrated by evolution over millennia, and the now-altered timing of prey availability. This is not a problem fixable by local conservation action - it requires systemic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Short-term welfare interventions like supplemental feeding have been used experimentally but cannot address the scale of the problem.